SIG Questionnaire: What It Is and How to Respond

A SIG questionnaire is the security assessment enterprise buyers send vendors before trusting them with sensitive data. SIG stands for Standardized Information Gathering, a framework maintained by Shared Assessments that covers around 20 risk domains, from access control to business continuity. If your company sells to banks, insurers, health plans, or large tech firms, you have almost certainly received one, and you know how much time a full response can absorb. This guide explains what the SIG questionnaire asks, how SIG Core differs from SIG Lite, and how to respond faster without cutting corners.

What is the SIG questionnaire?

The SIG questionnaire is a standardized set of questions that lets a buyer assess a vendor's security, privacy, and resilience controls in a consistent format. Rather than every enterprise writing its own security questionnaire from scratch, the SIG gives the industry a common language across risk domains such as access control, application security, cloud, incident response, and business continuity. It is published and updated each year by Shared Assessments, the organization that owns the framework.

Because the SIG maps to widely used standards, its questions often align with control frameworks your team already knows, including the NIST Cybersecurity Framework, ISO 27001, and SOC 2. That mapping is exactly why a well maintained answer set can be reused across the SIG and the many custom questionnaires buyers still send.

SIG Core vs. SIG Lite

The SIG comes in more than one form, and knowing which one you have been sent changes how you plan the work. SIG Core is the comprehensive version; SIG Lite is a condensed subset. Buyers pick between them based on how much risk the relationship carries.

Both versions draw from the same risk domains, so the good news is that answers you approve once can serve both. The difference is depth, not subject matter, which means a single governed answer library covers the Core and the Lite with no duplicate effort.

How to respond to a SIG questionnaire faster

A faster SIG questionnaire response comes from treating your answers as a managed asset, not a document you rebuild each time a buyer asks. Three habits do most of the work.

Build a reusable answer library

Move every approved security answer into a single content library with a named owner and a review date on each entry. When a SIG asks about your encryption standard or incident response plan, there is one approved answer, not five conflicting drafts scattered across email. On the next SIG, exact-match autofill populates what you have already signed off on, so your team reviews rather than rewrites.

Handle the multi-tab Excel structure

The SIG usually arrives as a large multi-tab Excel workbook, with each risk domain on its own tab. Rebuilding those tabs by hand is where hours disappear and copy-paste errors creep in. Work directly in the spreadsheet, choose which tabs apply to the request, and autofill answers into the right cells so the workbook keeps its original structure on export. Preserving the buyer's format matters, because a reformatted SIG slows down their reviewer and reflects poorly on you.

Route open questions to the right owners

Assign the questions that need fresh input to the subject matter expert who owns that domain, with a deadline and an approval gate. Security owns the document while infrastructure, legal, and privacy confirm their own sections. Nothing ships until the right person signs off, so accuracy is built in rather than checked in a last-minute scramble.

Common SIG questionnaire mistakes to avoid

The most common mistake is reusing last year's answers without checking them against the current SIG version or your current controls, which puts stale claims in front of a buyer's security team. A close second is letting one person own the entire response, which creates a bottleneck and a single point of failure. Teams that treat the SIG as a repeatable security questionnaire workflow, especially in enterprise technology, respond faster and with fewer errors than teams that start from a blank workbook every time.

Turn the SIG into a repeatable workflow

If your team rebuilds the SIG questionnaire from scratch for every deal, RocketDocs can turn it into a repeatable, audit-ready workflow backed by private AI that keeps your security answers inside your own environment. Book a demo built around your real questionnaires and see how much of the next SIG you never have to write again.